says: “Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in countless instances the small offences for which white men are quickly apprehended are, in the negro, habitually ignored.” A negro study of negro crime (Atlanta University Publications, No. IX.) says, “It seems fair to conclude that the negroes of the United States, forming about one-eighth of the population, were responsible in 1890 for about one-fifth of the crime.” This purports to be a correction of the estimate above quoted by Mr. Kelly Miller. Complete statistics of a later date do not seem to be available; but according to the same publication, negro crime reached its maximum about 1895, when negro convicts numbered 2·33 per thousand of the whole negro population. Since then the percentage has notably decreased. In 1904 it stood at 1·78 per thousand.

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XII AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY

It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro) told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true; but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in taxes. “Let us reduce their education to the scale of their taxation,” I have heard it said, “and where would they be?”[33] The true question is: Where would the South be? Probably half-way back to barbarism.

But if we ask: Has the South neglected its plain duty towards the children of the freedmen? or has it heroically, in its poverty, devoted to the education of the black child money that could be 105ill spared from the beggarly education fund of the white child?[34] we cannot rest content with the answer, “It depends on the point of view.” On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the favourable judgment is the true one; but I should hold it with greater confidence if there had not existed in the past, and did not survive to some degree in the present, a violent feeling against the very idea of negro education. In many places white teachers of black children are to this day ostracised.[35] One may even say, I 106think, that, as a general rule, it takes some strength of mind for a white man or woman to follow the vocation of teaching negroes.

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The hostility to negro education has, however, 

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